Our minds are powerful tools that shape our every day lives. Computers are also very powerful tools that aid us in finding and storing information, but so do our minds. So we could say that computers are just like brains in a way. And that our brains are like a computer.

Now, I had this “argument” with my dad about whether computers make you smarter; My dad says computers definitely make people smarter and that’s why the next generation is more intelligent.
I don’t agree.

I believe it’s the information we feed the computers that make us more computer savvy, not necessarily smarter though. Computers, if used only for mind numbing activities, can make us lazy and uninformed.

We can look at this in two different ways: In a way, yes, computers can make you more knowledgeable, but it all depends on what you are using your computer for. There is a huge difference between a “couch potato” gamer who does nothing but waste away hours and hours playing games and an honors student researching for a master’s degree or a programmer creating new software.

It’s the information we put into computers that can make us smarter, not the actual computer itself. In fact computers are solely made for one purpose: calculations. Literally, the only thing a computer does is input information and decode that information using arithmetic.

Maybe it’s just the sentence I’m having a problem with: computers make us smarter. A computer is a machine that we have to program.

So what do you think? Do you think computers make us smarter or do you think computers make us lazy?

Just a thought…